Headline in the New York Times on October 9, 2019: ACT Change Will Allow Students to Retake Individual Sections. According to the article, “Starting next September, high schoolers won’t need to repeat the entire ACT exam to improve their score. High school students will find the intense pressure to present their best efforts on the ACT exam a bit easier next year as they buckle down to the competitive college admissions process . . . The change would allow students to avoid getting worse marks on sections they had taken earlier . . . [S]ome parents, students and tutors wondered if the option to focus their improvement efforts would fan the frenzy over test scores, further disadvantaging students who do not have access to coaching . . . Students can take the test up to 12 times . . . the two dominant test makers, ACT and the College Board, which administers the SAT, have been locked in a competitive battle over market share. About 1.9 million students take the ACT per year, and about 2.1 million take the SAT.”
Let’s be clear -- High-stakes testing companies like ACT, the College Board which markets the SAT and advanced placement exams, and Pearson are businesses, not public service organizations. Students, their families, school districts, and colleges are their customers. Changes in exams are intended to improve sales and revenue, not to promote education. The exams themselves, their products, favor the affluent who can afford to pay for tutors, cram sessions, and as we now know from guilty pleas, for illegal shenanigans.
In May, Gregory and Marcia Abbott pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy for paying $50,000 to have a test proctor correct answers on their daughter's ACT exam and $75,000 for her SAT. The couple was sentenced to a year of supervised release, a $45,000 fine, and 250 hours of community service. They got off lightly. Felicity Huffman and Gordon Caplan were sentenced to jail time after pleading guilty in similar cases.
ACT recently announced that starting during the 2020-2021 school year high school students will not have to take the entire test over again if they just want to improve their score on a specific part. The change would protect students from getting worse grades on sections they previously had done well on. It is also a marketing ploy by a company facing serious downturns as parents increasingly choose to have their children, inundated by high-stakes tests on every grade level, opt-out whenever possible. They are in sharp competition for a declining number of customers with the College Board SAT college entrance exam at the same time that an increasing number of colleges and universities no longer require applicants take these exams. Currently about four million students take the exams every year. Critics charge that the ACT test change will primarily benefit affluent families who can afford to pay-to-play. Students can take the ACT as many as twelve times at between $52 and $68 a pop.
While testing companies continue to claim their products predict student readiness for college level work, research undermines their assertions. One study that included data from twenty-eight colleges and universities with reviews of almost a million students found that the ACT and SAT tests failed to identify talented applicants capable of succeeding in higher education, especially minority group members. Tracking students during the course of their college careers, the study also found that while first-year grades were “slightly lower for nonsubmitters,” students who had not submitted ACT or SAT exam scores “ended up highly successful, graduating at equivalent rates or -- at some institutions -- slightly higher rates than did those who submitted test scores.”
Another study, released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, discovered only “trivial” difference in graduation rates and grade point averages between students who submitted SAT and ACT test results and those who did not. This study looked at the performance of over one-hundred thousand students at 33 institutions. As of January 2018, over 1,000 United States colleges and universities no longer required that applicants submit SAT or ACT test scores.
While ACT is technically a not-for-profit corporation, it functions very much like a profit-making enterprise. Its CEO, Marten Rooda, is a board member for the Association of Test Publishers (ATP) and earns a base salary of $700,000 a year. Under Rooda’s leadership, ACT is converting from solely a testing company into what he describes as a “multidimensional educational enterprise” that includes “selling products and services to colleges for their enrollment-management operations, their developmental-education programming, and even their classroom analytics systems. It's also beefing up its offerings of tests and tools for the growing workplace-readiness market.” For a not-for-profit, it is heavily invested with venture capitalist firms. The new direction and Rooda’s leadership style do not seem to be popular with company employees. Rooda received a D+ rating on the website www.comparably.com.
Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8